Various Small Fires (VSF) is pleased to present Jeff Zilm’s Relics of the Epoch, the artist’s Los Angeles debut and first solo exhibition with the gallery.
In his latest series of “emulated paintings” Zilm sources digital image files recovered from his defunct Macintosh computer installed with the System 7.1 operating system (c. 1992-1994), which serves as a personal time capsule of drawings by the artist from the mid-1990s. Using an online image emulator, he redraws and stacks multiple layers of the retrieved images, from which he forms a ‘negative collage’ that becomes increasingly frenetic by removing, splicing, skewing and cropping selections. Implementing an absurdist practice of digital image forensics, Zilm describes the process as an autopsy of his own work, examining and piecing together palimpsests of personal visual detritus.
Zilm prints the resulting digital collages on Kodak canvas with a large format UV printer, continuing his investigation of painting as a transcription of media and a carrier of temporalities. Sometimes he finishes the work with airbrush or affixes additional printed material to the face of the painting, further destabilizing the layers of hypnotic patterns. The soft boundary of the airbrush becomes a pulse from which the rest of the schematic background seems to vibrate outward, causing a disorienting optical effect. These “emulated paintings” follow from Zilm’s “film paintings” series, in which pigment was extracted from the emulsification of early 20th Century black and white film reels, as Zilm continues to mine obsolete formats of visual media for reconstitution as paintings on canvas (the most obsolete and yet persistent of media formats).
In the gallery’s outdoor courtyard are three readymade sculptures, each a large weatherproof antenna with mounting hardware.
